Eventually I decided to do something about it, mainly because none of my t-shirts fit me anymore, and I have a really fucking good collection of t-shirts, I spent ages collecting them, and I want to wear them again. (Which reminds me, whatever happened to my Mogwai t-shirt? I loved that one. I haven’t seen it in ages.) So I’ve decided to get healthy, but this time I’m trying something different. It’s called exercise. You may have heard of it, it is quite the fashionable thing.

I don’t do exercise. I tried a bit of it during the Year of Health, but I found it to be quite as objectionable as I remembered it being from school. If Darwin had intended us to run more he would have designed us better knees. But since the idea of dieting fills me with the same kind of dread I normally associate with hearing the first single from a former X Factor contestant, I figured I’d give it a sht. This being me I decided to go all in and join a gym. I have done exactly that.

I’ve been going for a week now, and I’m still fat, which means all those workout montages you see in films are rubbish, because they only do it for a few minutes and they’re in shape. I’ve done about five hours now, and I don’t think I’ve lost any significant weight. It’s difficult to tell though, because the powers that be lock the scales away in the office. I might have put weight on for all I know.

I decided to work my way in slowly, eschewing the weights for the more fat-burning pleasures of the treadmill and the exercise bike. I was slightly put off the cross trainer at first by the fact that it looked like some kind of contraption from one of the Saw films, but once I tried it I actually found it really good, much easier to build pace on than the treadmill, so not it has become my weapon of choice. So after work I now more often than not pop into the gym for an hour. I don’t push myself particularly hard, I aim for around 500 calories burnt in an hour. The endeavour has been made a lot easier still by the discovery that I can watch films on my phone, propped up on the machine and with headphones in. This means I can catch up with the kind of stupid ‘man film’ that I don’t get to watch much anymore since Ellen finds them as infantile as boring as they actually are. By splitting them over two sessions I’ve so far ticked off X Men Origins: Wolverine, and Terminator: Salvation. Next up are Tron: Legacy, and Iron Man 2. If it weren’t for the last of these I’d think I’d developed an irrational love of films with colons in their title. Anyway, these films are quite handy, since they don’t require a huge amount of brain power, which means it can be directed to getting my legs moving properly, and because during the action sequences I actually find I get a bit more exercisey and active.

Still, all of this nice gentle exercise didn’t prepare me for the personal trainer session I had on Sunday. For my first one I’d had a nice little chat in the office then told to get and acquainted with the equipment, so naturally I expected more of the same. What I actually got was a session of physical torture that has left me broken, muscles still screaming at me four days later whenever I try and do anything so strenuous as opening a door. What’s more, I have my third and (bless the SkyMan) last session today, before I go off and sit through the entirety of Captain America so I can see the Avengers trailer. The very thought of this fills me with dread. I had considered cancelling it and moving the appointment, but I figured better to get it out of the way, and if nothing else, use the pain inflicted on me last time as an excuse not to do too much this afternoon. But if you do not hear from me again, you’ll know I’ve been snapped in half by a fitness trainer.

For the most part I’ve been taking December as a ‘month off the Internet’, save for the occasional pop round the door of Twitter or Facebook to say hello, or tell crap jokes which then get ignored or scorned upon. It’s been refreshing, and I’m not really sure how much I’ve really missed it, but that has as much to do with still being burned out by Nanowrimo as it does with the Internet itself, I suspect. Nonetheless, given that it is the end of the year I feel somewhat compelled to come back and pester you with some half formed thoughts about the year that has gone by.

First of all, I’ve decided not to burden you all with the standard top ten lists malarkey this year. Unless you are really very good at them and your opinion carries some weight then let’s face it they are by and large a big heap of Gillian McKeith. Either you list a load of stuff that everyone’s already heard or seen and come off as being too mainstream and boring, in which case why bother. On the other hand if you try and go for more obscure things then you end up looking like a shallow scene wanker trying to point out how cool he is by listing a load of stuff you’re not cool enough to have heard. Over at Demon Pigeon Dan and the others lampooned this pretty effectively, so I’m just going to say there are a few albums this year which have blown me away, if you’ll spare me a moment’s indulgence I will tell you what they are.

Firstly the new Dillinger Escape Plan album, Option Paralysis, blew me away in March and has rarely been off my stereo since. It manages to be both the melodically adventurous and poppy metal album I’ve ever heard, and conversely the most brutal as well. There’s only one word for it, and that’s bewildering. Other metal albums I’ve really enjoyed this year have been the new Knut album, Wonder, and the excellently named Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza’s third album. I reviewed all three for Demon Pigeon so if you want more on them by all means click on them there links. I quite liked the new Misery Index album as well, even if it is a bit generic it’s a good laugh.

As for non-metal I’ve loved the Joanna Newsome triple album Have One On Me and the new Sufjan Stevens album Age of Adz. The latter especially is a lovely bold move by Stevens, incorporating digital effects and even auto-tune and vocoder without ever sounding generic or bland. These are by no means the only albums I have enjoyed, but they are the ones that stand out. As for gigs, well it’s been a bit sparse but the excellent Damnation Festival was a great day out, and Richard Herring’s Hitler Moustache was probably the best stand up I’ve ever seen.

I’ve only been to the cinema a handful of times so I feel ill-qualified to talk much about this year’s film crop, but rather predictably I loved Inception and HP7a. I’m sure Social Network would have made me very happy with its mix of being geeky/being written by my favourite writer/being directed by David Fincher, but I never got to see it, so I am now left to wait impatiently for the DVD release. Not being able to see many new films has not stopped me from getting addicted to the Kermode and Mayo podcast however, and hello to Jason Isaacs if you are readong. Which of course you aren’t. I’ve been watching far more television this year, and it’s been a bumper bonanza of goodness in that regard. I was mentioning to Ellen the other night how it’s felt that this year British Sci Fi has taken over again from its glossier American counterparts. Consider the quality of the second series of Being Human or Misfits, or most strikingly the new Stephen Moffatt helmed Doctor Who and contrast that with the rather stale reimagining of V, or flashforward, or any of the other Heroes clones wheeled out to fill the void left by Lost and Battlestar. Long may it continue, although the news that the new American based Torchwood is being mainly done by ex Buffy writers may mean American Sci Fi goodness returns next year. In non sci fi I think Any Human Heart was about as perfect as TV drama gets, just a sumptuous feast of excellence.

At the end of the most turrbulent year in politics that I have experienced in my adult life, I now strangely feel I have nothing to add. This may be because i think everyone is now so much more engaged with what is going on around them that I have nothing to add to the reams of available information or commentary, or it could just be because I couldn’t possibly put anything better than my favourite blog of the year Enemies of Reason, which has grown month by month into the most authoriative and correct voice in my feed reader. If you don’t already read every single word that Anton Vowl puts out, then I highly recommend you do so. But please don’t judge me for having the same wordpress theme as him. All I will say is that having supported the Liberal Democrats for all of my adult life on the grounds that they were a little less interested in power and more interested in their values it’s quite staggering the extent to which they have sold those values out for a modicum of power. 

On a personal level, I think I can call 2010 a good year overall, although financially it’s been an absolute nightmare. But Ellen and Rosie and I moved into a proper family house in May, I am close to passing my driving test, I launched Demon Pigeon which has turned out to be reasonably popular, although I am not under any illusions as to my own responsibility for this success given the excellent assembly of writers that are now doing the words. On top of DP I wrote a lot for Blood on the Motorway (still hope to launch soon) and wrote the first draft of another novel. On the flip side after a very successful first six months the Year of Health experiment turned out to be a pretty catastrophic failure and I am back up to the weight I was at the beginning of the year, and that’s before even the indulgence of the next few weeks to go on top of that. I have managed to give up smoking however, so that one goes firmly in the win column. As for the weight I am going to try again in January, but one suspects this will be a battle I will be having with myself for most of the rest of my life. I say most, because I plan on not caring when I get to pensioner age. I have taken the YOH site down now since it was being spammed to a ridiculous level, but all the posts are now floating around in here, so if you missed any of it feel free to try and work out where they are.

As for next year, well I have other news that I cannot share at the moment but I think it’s fair to say that 2011 is going to be a brilliant one. I will share more when I can, but that might be a few months away yet. As for you lovely readers, if you’ve managed to make it through this most sparse of years, where my average post count has never crept above one a week then I must say a hearty thank you, and I wish you all a lovely Xmas and a Happy New Year. I leave you with a video from my favourite album of the year, because nothing says Christmas like a buff man shouting over tech metal.

Merry Xmas you beautiful bastards.

It turns out that one huge benefit of making your post a private one is that you get to see exactly who is reading it, because they have to contact you direct and ask you for a password. Which is nice. Thankfully quite a few of you did, and provided me with just the ego-massage that I required. What you didn’t do, by and large, was leave me any helpful comments. If you don’t know what I am talking about then by all mean feel free to email me, hit me up on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll send you the password. But despite the warming glow of people asking to read something of yours I shall resist the temptation to ask you to do so again, I suspect I’d get far less of a take up than before.

I’ve been feeling a bit more productive again of late, and having pretty much rounded up part one of Blood On The Motorway it’s time to turn back to my normal blogging. Before we go any further let me do a little bit of whoring and point you in the direction of a piece I wrote for Demon Pigeon about Axl Rose and a bit of a moratorium over at the Year of Health. As well as this I’ve taken my first steps into the wider world of trying to get paid for writing things. I’ve signed up to a company called Suite101, which is a site that gets you to write short articles for them and then they pay you a slice of the Google Advertising revenue that you get from the article. On the face of it this is not going to be a particularly lucrative deal, but from what I can tell (and the proof will come if this actually happens for me) but most articles wont pull in more than, say, $1 a month, unless they get really noticed. But that’s not actually that bad when you consider that will be for 12 months. If I can crank out three or four of these articles a week, then it wont be long before I build up enough of a head of steam that the money coming in will be quite nice. It’s never going to be enough to allow me to survive on it (unless I get really lucky on it and have a whopping hit of an article) but it’ll be a nice bit of extra cash.

That is, of course, if it works as advertised. I’m still pretty sceptical about the whole thing, but the way I see it is that if it doesn’t work then I’ve not really lost anything save for a little bit of time. As well as that, it’ll give me an excuse to write some copy that I can then use in a portfolio, and broaden the type of writing I can show around. As much as I love Demon Pigeon, it’s hardly the kind of content that is likely to lead to a job. I really do want to start building up a decent portfolio, and as much as I’ve kept writing in public ever since I left the Asian Express, very little of it is usable for a portfolio, and most of the stuff I can use is about 5 years old, and a lot of that is not really very good. So even if this doesn’t bring in the cash, I can write about whatever I want, so I can use it as an exercise in bulking out my portfolio. But I do hope it does bring in the cash.

But that’s enough shop talk. I know this blog has become a bit of a procrastination station recently, but I really do want to take the whole ‘writing’ thing seriously, and as a result it’s pretty much all I have to talk about. Boooooring.

So what else have I been doing? Not a lot. Yesterday I appear to have agree to another web project, although this one is not particularly labour intensive, should be fun too, and will probably become more popular than anything else. We shall see.

Other than that I have been largely watching the repeats of Mad Men on BBC2 on a Sunday night. It’s divine, even though nothing ever actually happens in it. One of the episodes this week had a plot that actually revolved around some people going for a drink after work, and nothing happened when they did. I am utterly transfixed. I think it’s the world’s most expensive and brilliant screensaver. The real hook in it is the characters, which are brilliantly drawn and very well acted, but have the added bonus that the writers make no effort to ascribe them a goal or obvious motivation. They’re just people, complex and trying to get through the day. Marvellous stuff and I am very happy knowing I still have three and a half series of it at the very least makes me happy. Oh, and talking about the show this much gives me justification to put pic of the lovely Christina Hendricks at the top of this post. Yum.

Other than that I’ve been watching a lot of the Hurricane Katrina docs that have been on to mark the five year anniversary. I’ve only watch the first half of the epic Spike Lee doc ‘When The Levees Broke’ but it’s magnificent, moving, and bewildering. Can’t quite see how it’s going to stretch to four hours though. Oh, and we’ve been watching the original Swedish Wallander, which is excellent but bloody hard work, so much so that watching one episode puts you off watching the next one a bit, even though it’s really enjoyable.

So yeah, it turns out that all I’ve been doing is watching telly. No change there then.

So, one of the things I really need to do if redefine this place.  And one of the first things I am going to do is ask you, my loyal readership, for your opinion.  Firstly, what do you think I should do with this place?  I have had a blog far too long to get rid of it now, and yet I find it very hard to find things that would be interesting enough to share with you, my dewar and loyal readers, who are far too discerning and intelligent a breed to fob off with half formed thoughts and gibberish.  See what I did there? I paid you a compliment, now answer my question.

But before you do, I do have a second question, and this one is much more important. I am debating with myself the merits of taking on a further stupid project (not another website, don’t worry) this time in relation to Year of Health.  It’s something that ties in really well with what I am already doing, and will give me added impetus now that the initial stages are complete (I think it’s safe to say I am a non-smoker now.)  But what I have in mind will also require the selection of a charity to do it for.

But which one?  I do have a few favourite causes that I could do it for, NSPCC, Oxfam, Amnesty etc.  But to be honest the money I raise will probably be not very high, and certainly for these sorts of organisations nothing to write home about.  If I am going to do this (and I must stress I haven’t decided to do it yet) I would like it to be for a smaller organisation that would really benefit from the tawdry and pitiful amount that I will be raising.  I was really inspired by what Gray did with Twitterthon, doing it all for a small organisation that most of the people who donated had never had any cause to donate to.  The problem is that I have no real personal ties to any such organisation.

So here’s what I would like.  If you could recommend a charity to me, along with the reason that you think it’s worthy of support, and whoever does the best job of convincing me will be the winner.  Not particularly democratic, maybe, but that’s how I roll baby.  Ideally I am looking for something small, and maybe a bit out there.  But I leave it in your capable hands.

Having promised not to let my extracurricular activities preclude me from updating this place, the truth is that Year of Health and Demon Pigeon (not to mention the fallout of that business at the tail end of last year) have been keeping me pretty busy of late. Incidentally, both sites are now live, and I have to say I’m pretty pleased with the results, both in terms of the lifestyle change that Year Of Health has enacted within me, and in how Demon Pigeon has turned out, given it’s my first foray into the wider world of ‘doing the internet’ properly. If you haven’t done so yet, do go check them out.

But enough of the digital pimping, what else is new with me? Well, I’m in a new job, so that’s nice. Things are going pretty well at the moment, although I’m bloody knackered by the end of the day. Ellen got me the complete Buffy box set for Christmas, and to my pleasant surprise she’s really enjoying watching it with me at the minute, and we’re not even up to the bit in season two when it all gets really bloody good. You know the one, where the person does the thing? Yeah, you know. Don’t pretend you don’t.

I saw Avatar twice at the cinema, both times in 3d. The first time I was staggered by the sheer beauty of it, and the second time I realised that under all that brightly coloured 3d fauna there lay at the heart of it a distinctly average film. I’m going to be interviewing one of my all time favourite bands, and even if it is going to be via email that’s pretty bloody cool. Oh, and I’ve become a Gleek.

So I just wanted to pop by and let you all know that I’m still here, which I am, and that I fully intend to update this more often, well aware as I am that I owe you good people a lot of Cross Blogination posts. The fact that it’s my turn as well should spur me on a bit.

So how are all of you?

So first of all, a very happy new year to you all.  Last night was a pretty low key affair, seeing as Ellen was working until 10 at night and then started at 8 this morning, so we made do with a bottle of wine and the car crash of entertainment that was Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, but we still managed to salvage a lovely night out of it.

But of course this being the first day of a new year, you’ll be expecting resolutions, and lots of them. Well, there is one big one, and a few smaller ones. But the main one is a project that starts today, which I would like to officially unveil for you! Year of Health is a joint project my me and Ellen to get fit over the course of a full year. I wont go into any more detail than that for now, but please feel free to visit the site and give us much needed encouragement.

Other than that the big aims are to get Demon Pigeon launched this month (provisional logo artwork is very cool) and to launch the main Blood On The Motorway site by the end of the year.  I will also be gutted if I haven’t passed my driving test and moved house this year.

All in all I’m feeling pretty positive about the year ahead, or at least I would be if I didn’t need a cigarette so badly.  I hope that wherever you are reading this your hangover isn’t too bad, and I hope all my readers have a very happy 2010.